Mobilize Workers
Action Against Police Terror!

Racist NYPD Murder of Eric Garner

From cellphone video showing Eric Garner being
chokeholded to death by NYC cops, July 17. (Photo: New York Daily News)

The racists in blue uniforms of the New York Police
Department are at it again. Eric Garner, 43, a black asthmatic
father of six and grandfather, was standing on a corner on Bay
Street in the Tompkinsville section of Staten Island on July
17. He was set upon by cops who surrounded him, put him in a
chokehold and dragged him to the ground. Soon he stopped
moving. EMS medics did nothing to help him. Why don’t they
apply CPR to get him breathing, a bystander asked. Instead,
cops and medics stood by and watched him die.

The chokehold has been banned in New York for 20 years, but
they have never stopped. There have been over 1,000 chokehold
complaints since 2009 alone, and you can be sure this is only
a fraction of the number of times the deadly tactic was used.
No cop was ever seriously disciplined for this. What was
different this time was there are videos showing the encounter
from start to finish. They went viral on social media, as
outrage spread over another cop killing of a black man in NYC.

On the video you can hear Mr. Garner saying “I can’t breathe,
I can’t breathe” over and over, but this didn’t stop the
killer cops as they choked the air out of his windpipe and
lungs. Did he die of a heart attack, from his asthma? Makes no
difference: Eric Garner was chokeholded to death. It was racist
murder by the NYPD, and it was intentional.

The cops’ story is he was resisting arrest. Like hell. In
fact, they had been called to the scene about a fight. But Mr.
Garner, known on the street as a peace-maker, had already
broken it up. He was a big man, 350 pounds, but he was called
“the gentle giant.” The police knew him well, having arrested
him more than 30 times, mostly for the same bogus “crime” of
selling “loosies” – loose cigarettes people buy because they
can’t afford the astronomical taxes on a pack.

Mr. Garner was not “resisting arrest” – another phony crime.
He was protesting the constant police harassment: “I didn’t do
shit! I was just minding my own business,” Garner can be heard
telling the cops in one of the videos. “Every time you see me,
you want to mess with me,” he added. “I’m tired of it.. It
ends today. Please just leave me alone!” But they wouldn’t let
him alone. Eric Garner was targeted by murderous cops, he
dared to talk back, and so he was killed.

“It Ends Today”: Eric Garner's Parting
Words Become Rallying Cry

Elisha Flagg, sister of Eric Garner, center in blue, leads a
march on the 120th Precinct on Staten Island, July 22
following a vigil demanding justice for her brother who was
killed by New York City police.
(Photo: John Minchillo/AP)

At vigils and protests in the ensuing days, Eric Garner’s
desperate cry, “I can’t breathe,” and his parting words, “It
ends today,” have become rallying cries. The cops belong
behind bars. And not just Daniel Pantaleo, who applied the
chokehold and who has provoked numerous complaints of
brutality. All the police involved are accomplices. Moreover,
the EMS medics who did nothing are also guilty, of dereliction
of duty if not much worse.

On July 25, Rev. Al Sharpton and Mr. Garner’s family formally
asked for a federal civil rights probe of the police chokehold
murder and EMS non-action. At the funeral service at Bethel
Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Sharpton said a federal civil
rights violation resulted in jail for racist cop Volpe who
brutally tortured Abner Louima. But what about the cops who
murdered Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Sean Bell and so
many others? They all walked, because the “justice” system
stands by the police, the guard dogs of capital.

Internationalist photo

A sign held by Internationalist Group supporters who attended
Eric Garner’s funeral recalled the 1994 racist cop chokehold
murder of Anthony Baez who was playing football on a Bronx
street. A second IG sign read: “Workers Revolution Will Avenge
Trayvon Martin, Ramarley Graham, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell,
Troy Davis, Marcelo Lucero, Patrick Dorismond, Rekia Boyd” –
the list goes on and on of black lives snuffed out by killer
cops, racist vigilantes and black-robed judges. As a third
sign declared, “The Capitalist System Is Racist to the Core.”

What Is To Be Done?

The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin asked that question
over a century ago and it’s still the right one to ask. There
has been a lot of justified outrage expressed over the killing
of Eric Garner, and some calls for cosmetic reforms, but
nothing that gets to the root. New Yorkers Against Bratton are
calling to fire the police commissioner. William Bratton was
named top cop by Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the
mid-1990s when police swooped down on black neighborhoods,
arresting thousands of people on so-called “quality of life
crimes.” Now Bratton’s back, and pursuing his same “broken
window” strategy.

Bratton arrogantly announced that nothing would change in
NYPD policies as a result of the killing of Eric Garner. Sure,
they may do some “retraining” about use of force, but that
won’t stop kill-crazed cops who keep on choking their victim
as he complains he can’t breathe. It also won’t put a dent in
the astronomical arrest numbers – almost 400,000 a year in a
city of 8 million. Even after massive protests against NYPD
victimizing young men for the crime of “walking while black,”
Brooklyn teachers say their 13- and 14-year-old students are
regularly “stopped-and-frisked” on the way home from school.

NYC
top cop William Bratton (left) with his boss, liberal mayor
Bill de Blasio speaking to the press, July 17. Democrats are
crowing that de Blasio avoided a riot. But the racist NYPD is
still up to its dirty work. (Photo: Spencer Platt via Getty
Images)

But what about Bratton’s boss, Bill de Blasio? Vacationing in
Italy, he declares his full faith in Bratton. The liberal
mayor has gotten a free ride from protesters, who hated the
snarling racist Giuliani, plutocrat mayor Michael Bloomberg
and his top cop Ray Kelly but many of whom love “progressive”
Democrat de Blasio, even though he appointed the police
commissioner and approved Bratton’s tactics. Not us. As an
Internationalist sign declared: “Bloomberg/Kelly, De
Blasio/Bratton, ‘Stop and Frisk,’ Chokeholds: It Doesn’t Stop
– For Workers Revolution!”

At the time of his election last fall, we said “De Blasio
Will Be ‘Bloomberg Lite’.” He has to be: as a leader of the
capitalist Democratic Party, he takes his orders from Wall
Street and Washington. Even though our headline angered many
liberals, de Blasio’s first six months in office proved us
right: a green light for charter schools; closing of Long
Island College Hospital despite repeated community protests
(including some grandstanding by de Blasio himself); calls for
raising the minimum wage forgotten; and now backing up the
killers-in-uniform, the NYPD.

De Blasio never pretended he was going to do away with “stop
and frisk,” just “reform” it. Now there are calls to reduce
the number of “quality of life” misdemeanor arrests. Many if
not most of these are no crime at all, like putting your feet
on a subway seat. Selling untaxed “loosies”? Abolish the
punitive tobacco tax! Turnstile jumping? Rip out the
turnstiles and have free mass transit! “Broken windows” lead
to major crimes? Like what? We don’t see Wall Street
executives who looted the U.S. Treasury for trillions of
dollars getting stopped and frisked!

The New York Times (25 July) reports: “All told,
since 1994, the police in New York City have arrested more
than 1.3 million people for misdemeanors who had never been
previously arrested for a penal-law crime….” The reason for
this arrest mania is not some “compstat” computer system or a
particular strategy or tactic, not is it limited to the NYPD.
The purpose of this racist mass incarceration, of the
“school-to-prison pipeline,” is to put millions of African
American, Latino, Asian and poor youth in the chokehold of the
repressive apparatus of the capitalist state: subject to the
revolving door of jail, parole, constant harassment,
monitoring, surveillance and joblessness.

Get another police chief? Like Kelly who arrested 700 Occupy
Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, had his cops
pepper spray and slam them to the ground and sent Cecily
McMillan to jail for the crime of “resisting” when cops
grabbed her breasts? (Before heading the NYPD, Kelly led a
U.S. imperialist police force in Haiti under Democrat Bill
Clinton.) Replace the chokehold with tasers? Are they kidding?
Tasers kill too. The issue is not just policy or personnel but
power, and the answer to endemic, systemic racist cop
terror is to mobilize a greater power than the police, greater
even than the capitalists they serve and protect.

That power is in the hands of the working class, and the many
millions who suffer at the hands of the NYPD and their Wall
Street bosses. The response to heinous crimes like the murder
of Eric Garner should be to massively mobilize NYC workers and
the oppressed in class-struggle action. Notably, Eric Garner’s
mother Gwen Carr is a train operator for the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority and his sister Elisha Flagg is an MTA
bus driver. Several TWU Local 100 members came out the funeral
Wednesday, some there to show their solidarity even without
knowing that this terrible crime had hit their union sisters.
The TWU should strike to shut the city down in protest
against this cold-blooded killing of their members’ brother
and son.

But that can only be a first step. We need to break labor and
the black, immigrant, poor and working people free from the
stranglehold of the Democratic Party, to build a multiracial,
class-struggle workers party. Capitalism survives by making
its wage slaves’ lives hell. It will take nothing less than
workers revolution to put an end to this system of racist
police repression and make Eric Garner’s last wish a reality.
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